A free guide for pastors

The Sunday-to-Monday gap

Five ways your church may be invisible online, and how to fix each one yourself, for free. From one pastor to another.

You prepare all week. You preach your heart out on Sunday. By Monday, that word has reached everyone who was in the room, and almost no one else. Meanwhile the people of your town scroll past hundreds of messages a day, and your church isn't one of them.

This guide is a gift, not a pitch. Everything below you can do yourself, for free, this week. If at the end you'd rather hand it to someone who does this every day, that's what Digital Gospel is for. But start here.

Nobody searching "church near me" can find you

When someone new to the area, or someone in a hard season, types "church near me" or "church in [your town]" into Google, does your church appear? For most churches the honest answer is no. You're invisible at the exact moment someone is looking for you.

The free fix: Claim your free Google Business Profile at business.google.com. Add your service times, address, photos and a link to your website. It takes 20 minutes and puts your church on Google Maps and in local search results, at no cost. This one step alone reaches people actively looking for a church.

Your website is a dusty noticeboard, not a front door

Many church websites were built years ago and haven't been touched since. Service times are wrong, events have passed, and a first-time visitor can't quickly find the one thing they need: when and where to turn up, and what to expect.

The free fix: Add a simple "Plan Your Visit" page. Three things a nervous first-timer wants to know: what time, where exactly (with parking and directions), and what happens when they arrive. Put those front and centre. You don't need a new website to do this, just clearer content on the one you have.

Sunday's sermon dies on Sunday night

You pour hours into a message that lands once, on one morning, for the people already in the building. Then it's gone. The truth in it never travels beyond the room.

The free fix: Take one 30-to-60-second clip from each sermon, the single most quotable moment, and post it to Facebook and Instagram during the week. One sermon can become a short clip, a quote graphic, and a written devotional. Free tools like Canva make the graphics; your phone records the clip. One message, a whole week of presence.

You post when you remember, not when it matters

Church social media often goes quiet for weeks, then posts three times in a day before an event. To the algorithm and to people scrolling, an account that only wakes up occasionally looks abandoned. Consistency matters more than volume.

The free fix: Pick two fixed days a week and post something small on each, even if it's just an encouraging verse or a photo from Sunday. Use the free scheduler built into Facebook and Instagram (Meta Business Suite) to line up a week's posts in one sitting. Rhythm beats bursts. A church that shows up every week feels alive.

You're leaving free advertising on the table

Here's the one almost no church knows: Google gives eligible charities up to £7,500 every month in free search advertising through the Google Ad Grant. Most UK churches are registered charities and qualify. Almost none use it. That's thousands of pounds of free reach going unclaimed, every single month.

The free fix: If your church is a registered charity with a working website, you can apply at google.com/nonprofits. It puts your church in front of people searching for exactly what you offer, funded entirely by Google. It takes some setup and has rules to follow, but the reach is real and it costs nothing. (This is the one most churches ask us to handle, because the setup is fiddly, but you can absolutely do it yourself.)

Start with one

Don't try to do all five this week. Pick the one that stings most, and do it. Then come back for the next. A church that fixes even two of these will reach more of its community this year than it did last year, without spending a penny.

And if you'd rather not carry this yourself, that's the whole reason Digital Gospel exists. We run every one of these for our own church in Bromley, week in and week out, and for other churches too.